That's another great thing about getting older. Your life is written on your face.
My name is Frances Louise McDormand, formerly known as Cynthia Ann Smith. I was born in Gibson City, Ill., in 1957. I identify as gender-normative, heterosexual, and white-trash American. My parents were not white trash. My birth mother was white trash.
I was often told that I wasn't a thing. 'She's not pretty enough. She's not tall enough. She's not thin enough. She's not fat enough.' I thought, 'O.K., someday you're going to be looking for someone not, not, not, not, and there I'll be.'
The only power you have is the word no.
I think that there's a clinical mental illness called depression, but I believe that post-industrial America has been narcotized by progress. There's a cultural malaise - mental illness or no - that everybody suffers from at some point in their life.
With aging, you earn the right to be loyal to yourself.
I am an ordinary person.
I'm not a depressive, but I certainly have mood swings. It's an occupational hazard, I would say, and I'm glad I'm in the occupation I'm in.
When you lose a spouse, you're a widow or widower; when you lose your parents, you're an orphan. When you lose a child, there's no word in the English language for that position, that place that you're left.
I was too old, too young, too fat, too thin, too tall, too short, too blond, too dark - but at some point, they're going to need the other. So I'd get really good at being the other.
A 90-minute time frame is not long enough to tell a good female story, and that's why long-format television has become so great for female storytelling and for female performers and directors and writers.
My position has always been that the way people age and the signs that we show of aging is nature's way of tattooing. It's natural scarification, and the life you lead gives you the symbols and the emblems of your life, the road map you followed.
If you want to talk about cultural appropriation, we have to go back to the Greeks.
I never trusted good-looking boys.
I've always known that I'll have a career for the rest of my life because they'll always make movies about men, and men need women in their lives. But, when it comes to telling a woman's story, they're complex, circular, and not genre-driven.
I have friends who are movie stars, and I think it's just as hard a job as being a working actor. But it's a different job, and it's not the one I want.
I think that ageism is a cultural illness; it's not a personal illness.
We are on red alert when it comes to how we are perceiving ourselves as a species. There's no desire to be an adult.
My politics are private, but many of my feminist politics cross over into my professional life.
I wasn't into sports, but I was really into Shakespeare.
